As to the US Open Cup format, there are other leagues/associations out there besides MLS, USL, and USASA (NPSL, for instance) and if they want to participate in US Open Cup I’m sure the USSF has some kind of formula worked out for letting them play in the early rounds. I don’t think there is any provision for “unaffiliated clubs”; I’ve never heard of unaffiliated pro soccer clubs, the concept is a bit of a non-starter. This ain’t college gridiron.

On the other hand, if you’re a billionaire who really wants to build a club that can win the Open Cup and compete in the Champions League, it can be done.

First, you’re going to need a quality stadium where you can play. That’s your first $15M.

Additional startup costs are about $7M, which gets you your coaching staff, medical staff, lawyers, office staff, advertising, community outreach and other overhead — not to mention your PDL club, which every USL-1 club has.

THEN you have to pay the 26 players on the roster. If you really want to blow out USL and be capable of beating anyone in MLS, you probably only need about $2.5M, and that’s with a salary range of $150K-200K for your stars and $40K for your bottom reserves — and they’ll gladly take $40K from you over $17.7K for an MLS developmental deal. (Keep in mind some current USL starters turned down developmental deals to make $30K-35K in USL.)

Oh, and you can only have 7 total foreign-born players, so you’re pulling a lot of talent from MLS — which might make it hard to schedule friendlies against MLS clubs, as the league might decide to get uppity with you. And because you’re the big spender, the other USL clubs are gunning for you every week.

So all told, you’ve spent about $25M in one season to build your USL superclub and run it for the first year — still less than the MLS expansion fee, but until you actually win the Open Cup and go deep into the Champions League knockout stage, you could end up losing several million bucks a year to keep your club going. And this is association football, where there are no real guarantees of success.

So yeah, good luck with that.

You are correct though, joejoejoe, in that the US Open Cup is an “achilles heal” of sorts for MLS, in that it makes it impossible for MLS to have a completely “closed shop” major league cartel like what you have with the big four leagues in the USA, because the minor league teams through the US Open Cup still have a chance to test themselves against the major league teams.

There is a rumor going around that some big new investors are coming into USL, and that they will be trying to make USL more competitive with MLS. If this happens, things could get very fun and interesting in the US Open Cup. If these new USL investors are real, and if they are smart, they will work on getting USSF to reorganize the US Open Cup and get it a proper sponsor and so on. I’ve posted my ideas for improving the US Open Cup over in the Soccer Fan House thread.

Let’s say I start up my own side and call it JOE FC and spend $10 million on start up costs, $10 million on 20 players at $500K each, and $2 million dollars on adverstising for the US Open Cup. I’m still $8 million dollars below the franchise fee for an MLS club, I have a chance to win the championship of America and publicize it around the world where international fans appreciate such things, and I’ve got 17 players who make significantly more money then all but one or two players on any MLS squad.

Nobody knows what the US Open Cup is but there is a great opportunity to piggyback on the already clear understanding of the US Open concept in golf and tennis and educate people what the tournament is all about. Winning it isn’t worth a lot of prize money but advertising around the world that you won the American soccer tournament that David Beckham could not is worth a lot more than $100,000.

If I was a billionaire I’d consider starting my own professional club in America and playing only friendlies and in various tournaments and then focusing everything on beating MLS sides in the US Open Cup and then rubbing their noses in it with an advertising campaign.

Being unaffiliated works for Notre Dame. Why not for a pro soccer team?